Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Scott D. Anthony on 11 Epic Disruptions That Changed History
18 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Coming up next on Passion Struck.
You need this duality, almost a paradox in your mind where you are simultaneously thinking about long-term future and present reality, recognizing if you don't care and deliver for today, you don't earn the right to do tomorrow.
But if you don't have a vision, a direction to which you're trying to go to for tomorrow, the efforts that you have in today are going to be misguided or even counterproductive. And the thing that I generally counsel leaders to do is make sure that you just stop and you apply different timeframes and mental models as you're looking at different things that you are trying to decide around.
Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters.
Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming.
Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact... is choosing to live like you matter. Welcome back to PassionStruck, friends.
I'm your host, John Myles, and this is episode 691 in our continuing November journey called The Irreplaceables. It's a month dedicated to remembering the things that technology can't duplicate and the world can't take from you. Each week, we're exploring a different piece of what makes you human, your courage, your presence, your imagination, your voice.
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Chapter 2: How do disruptions like gunpowder and the printing press reshape our world?
And if this show has ever sparked a new idea, shifted your perspective, or helped you take one small step forward, here are two simple ways to help it grow. First, share this episode with someone who needs it. Second, leave a five-star rating or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the single best way for new listeners to discover these conversations.
Last week, we walked two very different paths to rediscovering our worth. On Tuesday, I was joined by Elias Wise Friedman, who as millions know him, the doggest. who reminded us that connection can still break us open in the best way, sometimes in the middle of a sidewalk with a stranger and a dog. Then on Thursday, Amina Altai showed us that ambition doesn't have to drain us.
It can be rooted in purpose, alignment, and joy. And today we turn to another deeply human skill, your ability to imagine the future and then to step boldly into it. My guest today is Scott D. Anthony. one of the world's leading thinkers on innovation and disruption.
He's a clinical professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, a longtime partner at InnoCite, and a co-architect of some of the most influential frameworks in the innovation world, alongside the late Clayton Christensen. Scott's new book, Epic Disruptions, is a sweeping look at 11 breakthroughs that changed the course of history.
Chapter 3: Why do leaders often miss the future even when it's right in front of them?
from gunpowder to the printing press to the iPhone, and what they can teach us about navigating disruptions shaping our lives today. In our conversation, Scott and I explore why leaders miss the future, even when it's right in front of them. How to think in two time horizons at once.
what I call the bee and turtle effect, why the innovator's dilemma still haunts organizations and how to break free. We go into the human side of disruption, things like fear of loss, identity, and the courage to see differently. We discuss why AI mirrors the printing press more than we realize and why real innovation has never been a genius sport. It's always been a team sport.
before we dive in two quick invitations my new children's book you matter luma is now available for pre-order a story about courage connection and the ripple effect of mattering you can pre-order it at barnes noble or at youmatterluma.com and join me at theignitedlife.net my substack where i share deeper frameworks bonus interviews and tools to help you live more intentionally in a world moving faster every day now let's step into this groundbreaking clarifying
and future shaping conversation with Scott Anthony. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am so excited today to have Scott Anthony join me on PassionStruck. Hey, Scott, how are you today? John, I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me.
Chapter 4: What is the bee and turtle effect in innovation?
And I'm so honored to have you here, primarily because I've been studying your work for a couple of decades. So it's great to actually talk to a person who I admire and I applied their teachings into my professional career. I can't mention you without mentioning another person who deeply impacted my career, which was Clayton Christensen.
Can you take us back to that first spark and what drew you so deeply into the field and also into his work?
Yeah, for sure. So it started in September 2000. I was a second year student at the Harvard Business School, and I signed up for this class called Building and Sustaining a Successful Enterprise. It was a new class, so there were no reviews of the class. I just thought the description sounded interesting. The first day of the class, Clay Christensen ambles into the room.
He was six foot, eight inches tall, so quite a figure. And did something that was really quite anachronistic, which was he took out acetates, like actual slides, and put them onto a projector and started lecturing. And if you know anything about the Harvard Business School, that's really unusual. It is entirely the case-based method. That's just the way that classes start.
Chapter 5: How does AI mirror the printing press in terms of disruption?
But Clay was saying from the beginning, this is going to be a different class. Yes, we're going to do lots of cases. We're going to explore lots of territories. But I want to ground it in models, frameworks, and ways of thinking so that you leave it with new lenses to look at the world. And from that minute, I was captivated just by the approach.
Then as I learned about some of his thinking, well, we can explore that in more depth. I was even more hooked.
Must have been just amazing to work alongside Clay. I wanted to ask, how has your understanding of disruption evolved since those early Harvard days, especially with the evolution of AI that we see all around us today?
And the world certainly is different than it was in 2000 in lots of ways, for better in some and for worse in others. I always think about the sign that Clay had hanging in his office, the famous sign, anomalies wanted. Clay was a very good social scientist. When he saw something that didn't fit his research, He didn't seek to go and hide it or to refute it.
He sought to understand it so he could make his models, tools, and frameworks better.
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Chapter 6: What role does team collaboration play in innovation?
And certainly over the past 25 years, the world has gotten more complicated. I look a lot now to the research of my tech colleague, Ron Adner, who has done some great work on ecosystems to understand disruption sometimes occurs in a pocket of an ecosystem And if you don't take what Ron calls the wide lens and look at the entire ecosystem, you can sometimes miss the implications of it.
So that's one thing. You've had ecosystems and platforms emerge. So it's gotten more complicated. The other big thing that I would point out is Clay's first book, a famous book, The Innovator's Dilemma. The subtitle kind of says it all. When new technologies cause, wait for it, great firms to fail. What he said is there is a dilemma when disruption strikes.
When someone makes the complicated simple, the expensive affordable, my research says you bet on the attacker, the incumbent struggle with it. Over the past 25 years, people have read that book and read all the other work that's been produced and have learned that the innovator's dilemma presents the innovator's opportunity. In a previous generation, Microsoft would have missed cloud.
Chapter 7: How should leaders think about disruption in today's context?
It would have missed artificial intelligence. Meta would have missed messaging, would have missed Instagram. In this world, they see it. They respond to it. They can seize those opportunities. That is a huge shift.
It's interesting. One of the times I was most I've been involved with the research was during my time as an executive at Lowe's and I was taking MBA courses at Wake Forest. And I remember this course I was in was examining the Fortune 500.
And the professor was asking us to look at the evolution of the companies in the Fortune 500 list over the past 20 to 30 years and how many of the names had dropped off. because they were great companies, but they hadn't evolved enough to keep pace with the disruptions that were happening around them.
So I was taking this to heart and I was trying to influence our executive leadership team to understand that while Lowe's was in the retail industry, I thought we needed to stop looking at the industry itself and evolving to what other right-of-ways we might have that would make the company more powerful, such as our supply chain ecosystem, but also is trying to get them to think of us
as instead of I was in the IT organization, an IT impacted organization to becoming a software company or a retailer powered by software.
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Chapter 8: What future disruptions should we anticipate in the next 20 years?
And the current, that past leadership team, I couldn't get them to see it. But the new leadership team that's at Lowe's now actually describes the company as a software company. So it's crazy how paradigms shift over time and why it's so important. For sure.
And you've hit on a couple really important things. One, when you're dealing with a world where disruption is ever present, that's another big shift. In 2000, disruption was a niche phenomenon. Now it's pervasive. Alex Partners had a report earlier this year where two-thirds of leaders said that they had experienced disruption within the last year. So everybody is facing it to some degree.
When you have that kind of world, recognizing that the essence of the organization might not be what you think it is. You're not a retail company, but you're a software company that provides retail services. Or an organization that I consulted with back when I lived in Singapore, DBS Bank, it's not a bank, it's a technology company that happens to provide banking services.
That's a really important thing. And then second, this idea that you really do have to change in order to survive. I think people now understand this. And I suspect we're going to actually see a change in the long term trends. We're over periods of time, big churn in the Fortune 500, the S&P 500 and so on. But I think more and more organizations are getting it.
Of course, lots of exciting startups that are driving big change. But more and more big organizations recognize that standing still is moving backwards. And they have to change. They have to evolve if they're going to thrive in a world of never-ending disruption. It's an exciting time. It's a scary time at the same time.
One of the things I was trying to get them to see is I was the chief data officer in one of my roles, and we competed against Home Depot and others using data to our advantage, but they didn't see the more macro. When I look at companies like Amazon, I really think of Amazon as a data company and Lowe's had that opportunity to do the same given our customer interactions and other things.
But why do you think it's so hard for leaders at times to see themselves in a different light, like that Lowe's could be a data company, that we could compete against others using data. It's so hard to get people to make that leap. Yet, I think once you do, it's so apparent the chasm that can be crossed.
I think absolutely. I think one of the cases that I researched for my book, Epic Disruptions, helped to make this really clear to me. So I have a chapter about steel mini mills. If you study disruptive change at all, Clay Christensen loved the steel mini mill story. There were integrated mills that created big, expensive plants that created the best steel in the world.
And then there was a classic disruptive technology, steel mini mills that used electric arc furnace that did pretty good steel at really low prices and they drove big change in the space. So the question is, why did the market leader, Bethlehem Steel was one of them. It's the one I look into deeply in the book. Why did it struggle to go and adopt mini mill technology?
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